Many procedures and apparatus are available for testing textile fibers qualitatively and quantitatively. With many testing methods, the disordered fiber material--for instance floccular cotton--cannot be measured directly but instead must first be prepared into fiber strips with parallelized fiber positions. Such preparallelized fiber strips accordingly are the input to all test equipment which for testing require pre-parallelized fibers.
Such equipment for instance includes:
fiber aligners to array the ends of fiber tufts PA0 brushing stations for fiber tufts without end arrays PA0 tensile apparatus to determine the elongation and tear-resistance of bundles PA0 optical scanners such as image-data analyzers PA0 fiber-tear testers PA0 fiber fineness testers PA0 fiber sorting devices etc.
There is need in equipment of these types to detach the fiber strip several times from a processing drum in order to subject it to a further processing cycle. As to manually operated devices (see special print of G. Spiridinow in MELLIAND TEXTILBERICHTE 59 [1979]), it will be apparent that the manual separation of the fiber strips is very time-consuming and hardly reproducible. Manual operation demands high skill and moreover entails steady contact between the crude material and the bare skin, whereby sweat contamination cannot be avoided.